"No, thank Heaven!—if what people say is true."
"True enough. People don't ask Lady Hardy, but Sir George is a philosopher; he does not resent being asked out alone; and he has the good sense never to try and introduce one to his wife. There are two kinds of women—those you marry, and those you don't introduce to your friends. Sir George has them both in one."
"What a dead-weight such a woman must be! To be proud of one's wife, to be proud of one's husband—that is one of the great keys to happiness in married life. Oh, Gerald, do look at that imposing-looking matron; who is she?"
"The Dowager-Countess of Chausey, pretty well known for her serious flirtations in 1850."
"How can a woman of her age go about so outrageously uncovered? So long as English women do not show their feet, they think they are all right. Her dress is perfectly indecent."
"Not the dress, but its contents," said Lorimer. "The Countess might, it is true, draw a veil across the past and leave something to the imagination of the beholder. But the fun of the thing is, that the dowager is one of the vice-presidents of the society recently founded for the suppression of the nude in our museums and picture galleries. O the British matron!"
"What a proud carriage she has for a woman of her age," said Dora.
"One would think she was carrying the Holy Grail—two Holy Grails in a Parsifal procession."
"Upon my word, I do believe," said Dora, "that women nowadays trust to providence to keep their dresses on their backs! But what lovely frocks! I do not understand how there can still be people who say that the English woman does not know how to dress."
"Not now. A few years back one might have said with truth that the German woman was covered, the English woman was clothed!"